The Capra Collection, acquired in the late 1920s, is of considerable historic and ethnographic value and includes objects coming from Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand: a set of wooden shields painted with geometric motifs, a number of flat clubs, throwing weapons, staffs, boomerangs of various shapes, spear-throwers decorated with shells, stone axes, message-sticks, a selection of bows and arrows, and other traditional objects connected with Maori culture.
In the period from 1934 to 1936, the Collection of the Austro-Hungarian Navy Seearsenal in Pula was acquired by the Museum. The collections in question constituted a museum of the Imperial Royal Navy which, following the end of the First World War — with the Italian annexation of Istria — had inevitably been broken up: it was at this juncture that the ethnographic collection, comprising objects from Oceania and Africa, was secured by Raffaello Battaglia, director of the Institute of Anthropology in Padua at the time.
From India come many items of everyday use (teapots, dessert moulds, smoking bowls), musical instruments (flutes, violins, drums), toys, ornaments, sacred masks and representations of divinities. Other commonplace items such as weapons, religious objects and musical instruments come from Tibet, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and the Philippines.
There are also various objects from the Near East (mostly Turkey and Iran), acquired during the 1960s and ’70s: weapons (bows, clubs, swords, axes), shields, ornaments and amulets, small Qurans and Islamic rosary beads.
Whilst the collection has little to show from America, there is nonetheless a leather tunic, complete with accessories, that belonged once to the Sioux people.
Worthy of special mention is the fine collection of model ships originating from the Museum of Pula, which, tradition has it, was once displayed in the aft ward-room of an Austrian cruiser. These are models of vessels that once abounded in that part of the world stretching westwards from South-East Asia to the east coast of Africa, and eastwards to the far-off archipelagos of Melanesia (Fiji) and the remotest tip of South America (Tierra del Fuego).
